British minister Brooks Newmark quits over explicit photos

London: British prime minister David Cameron was plunged into a double crisis last night after one of his ministers resigned over a sex scandal and another MP defected to Ukip.

On the eve of the Conservative Party's annual conference, Brooks Newmark quit as the minister for civil society after he was caught sending an explicit photograph of himself to someone he believed was a woman over the internet.

Sources said Mr Newmark sent the image to someone posing as a user of a social networking website as part of a tabloid newspaper sting operation.

The revelations will be particularly damaging for the Prime Minister's effort to win more support from women. Mr Newmark is co-chairman and founder of the Tory campaign, "Women2Win", which aims to get more women elected to Parliament.

In a statement, Mr Newmark, the MP for Braintree, Essex, said: "I have decided to resign as minister for civil society having been notified of a story to be published in a Sunday newspaper.

"I would like to appeal for the privacy of my family to be respected at this time. I remain a loyal supporter of this Government as its long-term economic plan continues to deliver for the British people."

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A Downing Street spokesman said Mr Cameron had accepted Mr Newmark's resignation and Rob Wilson, a former aide to George Osborne would take his place as the minister for civil society.

Mr Newmark, 56, a married father of five, apologised after the scandal came to light.

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He initiated a private message conversation on a social networking website and sent a graphic picture exposing himself while wearing a pair of paisley pyjamas, according the Mirror newspaper.

He sent a text message to an undercover reporter on Saturday, asking if she would like to meet him at the party conference.

"Afternoons fairly full with speaking engagements but around late evenings. Promise we'll meet up though. X," the MP wrote.

The revelations infuriated the Conservative Party leadership. A Tory source said Mr Newmark's behaviour was "unacceptable".

"There is no excuse," he said. "It is indefensible. It is quite right that he has stepped down."

There was no answer at either Mr Newmark's London home, in Belgravia, or his constituency home, near Braintree.

The resignation came hours after Mark Reckless, the MP for Rochester and Strood, announced on television that he was defecting to the UK Independence Party.

He became the second Tory MP to defect to Ukip since the 2010 election, after Douglas Carswell announced last month that he was standing down.

The sex scandal MP who wanted 'women to win'

Until the embarrassing incident that prompted his resignation, Brooks Newmark was more famous for his attempt at DIY international diplomacy.

The Conservative MP for Braintree held a series of increasingly bizarre meetings over cups of tea with Syria's president Bashar al-Assad in the run-up to the country's civil war, in the hope of trying to find a peaceful resolution to the imminent conflict.

Mr Newmark first met Mr Assad - who he described as "incongruously softly spoken" but always "forthright" - in 2006 and continued to meet him on a one-to-one basis until 2011, after which he argued in favour of arming the rebels in order to give opposition forces a "chance of winning".

The MP, who said the Syrian people faced genocide and that Assad had to be brought down for their sake, may have gained an insight into military thinking from his father-in-law, Sir John Keegan, the military historian.

Born in the United States, Mr Newmark moved to Britain at the age of nine, where he attended Caldicott Preparatory School and Bedford School before graduating from Harvard College with a BA in History in 1980.

After receiving an MBA in Finance from Harvard Business School, in 1984, he went into the City, becoming vice-president in the International Division of Shearson Lehman Brothers and eventually senior partner at Apollo Management, an international private equity firm, amassing an estimated fortune of £3.2 million ($4.6 million).

He was elected MP for Braintree in the 2005 general election, defeating the Labour incumbent Alan Hurst, and was re-elected in 2010 with an increased majority.

From 2010 to 2012, Mr Newmark served as a Lord Commissioner at the Treasury. He markedly spoke out against the policy of quantitative easing, tweeting in October 2011 that "QE is the crack cocaine of monetarism. If all else fails print money".

He was appointed minister for the civil society, in the Cabinet Office, in July this year.

To compound his current embarrassment, Mr Newmark is also a founding member and co-chairman of the Conservative group Women2Win, which campaigns "to promote more of the brightest and best women the party has to offer and further convince Conservative associations of the benefits of putting their trust in female candidates". In its founding statement Women2Win promoted itself as "a broad cross section of men and women from across the Conservative Party".

Mr Newmark and his wife, Lucy, have four sons and one daughter. They have an £8 million ($11.5 million) property in Belgravia, central London, and a family home in his constituency.